Medic Bleep

Eastern AHSN and West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust have been trailing Medic Bleep, a communication tool, to improve service efficiency and reducing delays in sharing patient information between clinicians, staff and outpatient departments.

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Overview

Current one-way pager systems used to communicate patient information between members of staff are inefficient. Work is interrupted, time is wasted, prioritisation is difficult, and the evidence trail is limited. This has led to rising use of mobile-based applications like WhatsApp to share information, which fail NHS information governance requirements and aren’t safe for patient care. Medic Bleep provides the benefits of such applications on a safe and compliant platform across the trust.

“The health service still uses about 130,000 pagers, which is about 10% of the total left in use globally. They cost the NHS about £6.6m a year” – BBC News, Feb 2019

Impact & Outcomes

Time efficiency saving of 48 minutes per head per shift through a significant reduction in tasks needed to provide patient medicines prior to discharge

Staff who used Medic Bleep found it an easy to adopt way of communicating that they could relate to from personal/social experience use of smart mobile technology

£4.5 million in potential savings through freeing up the equivalent of 18 full-time nurses and 18 full-time junior doctors per annum, as well as reducing other post care issues caused by poor inter-team communication.